


Paradise

by Thinker6



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Superheroes, Supervillains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 09:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3203699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thinker6/pseuds/Thinker6
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eden lives. Fortuna is left to build her own paradise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paradise

May 20, 1982

We don't know how long she had been there. Suspended in the air above the Appalachian mountains. Three days ago, she was spotted by the organizer of an event for 'preppers', the survivalists who devote their time to preparing for societal or economic collapse. After a discussion among the survivalists and their families, they decided to climb to the top of the mountain to get a closer look. It was a sunny day, and they were tired and sweating by the time they reached the peak.

The woman was six and a half feet tall, her arms to her sides, her long hair blowing in the wind as she stood in the sky, nearly fifty feet above the mountain peak. Her skin and hair could only be described as living glass or crystal, giving an impression of translucency without revealing anything beneath. She wore clothing in shimmering shades of purple. A foreign style, in some ways hinting at a dress to be worn at an elaborate ball, in others hinting at a martial role, like the uniform of a general.

Most striking was her face. Her features were described as beautiful and expressive, the kind that could speak volumes with the arch of an eyebrow or the curve of a smile, punctuated by a pair of shining violet eyes. But those features were locked in place, contorted in a look of deep sadness and regret. She stared at the horizon, not seeming to notice the people gathered below her on the peak.

"I thought she was going to break into tears at any moment," said Alice Sheldon, who released her film of the event to the media. "But I was the one who found myself in tears, in sympathy for this beautiful creature who must have suffered an unimaginable loss.

"It was last year when I found out that my husband Ting was going blind. I spent a lifetime readying us for the worst, preparing us to survive the end times when we run out of oil and our civilization falls into ruin. Then I found out that Ting literally wouldn't be there to see it with me. I don't have to tell you how devastating that was to me. On that day, up on the mountain, all I could think was that I had found a kindred spirit in the most unlikely place. _She_ was the same as me.

"Ting's eyes are healthy now. The doctor says that he's in better shape than ever, as though his disease had never been. That beautiful creature, whatever happened to her, she looked into my soul and cured my husband so that I wouldn't have to suffer what she did."

After the group had been at the peak for fifteen minutes, the woman took notice of them and drew closer, moving effortlessly through the air. She landed on the mountain top and stood in front of a young boy, lowering her hand to grasp his chin and raising his eyes to meet hers.

And then she spoke. The witnesses described her voice as almost painfully beautiful, melodious and so clear that it seemed to skip their ears entirely and resonate inside their minds.

Her words are still a matter of controversy. The organizer of the event said she spoke in English. A native Israeli said she spoke in Hebrew. An indigenous woman from Mexico said she spoke in Chichimeca Jonaz, a language known to less than one thousand people worldwide.

What we can confirm is that the voice on the amateur video recording was English, spoken softly and tenderly, with an unidentifiable accent.

> _The video recording begins. The woman floats down toward the mountain peak and the bystanders part before her, torn between desires to approach and to escape. Voices are speaking in the background, shouts of surprise and panic._
> 
> "Whoa, watch out!"
> 
> "What's she doing?"
> 
> The woman lands in front of a child, and extends her hand to grip his chin. He doesn't retreat from her advance. He stares up at her, wide-eyed, and meets her gaze.
> 
> "Jacob, move away! You don't know what she is!"
> 
> The woman strokes the boy's cheek, and subtly shifts her gaze. As though she is looking _into_ him, _through_ him, at something vast that only her eyes can see.
> 
> **"I am sorry, my love. Forgive me."**
> 
> The chatter of voices cuts off. Dead silence.
> 
> The crystal of the woman's body glows with an inner light, suffusing the air around the mountain peak with a soft violet radiance. The light reaches a peak intensity and then fades away.
> 
> The woman refocuses on the boy in front of her, and strokes his cheek again. A hint of tension appears at her jawline, the grief on her face giving way to determination.
> 
> **"I will not allow our dream to die here."**
> 
> The woman releases the boy and _ascends_ , accelerating into the sky until she passes out of sight above the clouds.
> 
> A long moment of stillness. Then a man and a woman, the boy's parents, rush forward to wrap him in their arms, and the other voices return in a burst of excited and unintelligible chatter-  
> 

In the three days since the encounter, the mystery woman has been sighted more than forty times worldwide, many confirmed by video recordings. She has never been heard to speak again. Often she simply floats in place, or touches a person with a gentle caress, before rising into the air and leaving at a velocity in excess of the speed of sound. Many of those she visits report a religious experience of-

...  
...  
...

The dark-skinned woman in a lab coat muted the recording.

"Is it?" she said.

The girl nodded. "Yes."

The pair stared at the screen, watching the silent images.

"Do we try again?"

The girl fidgeted, rubbing one arm with the fingers of her other hand. As she moved her body seemed to shift its shape, her form changing depending on the observer's point of view. From one angle she was a young girl, scarcely ten years old, wearing a tattered white dress. From another angle she was a towering, muscled man, bearded and with long hair, wearing a white tunic. All the forms shared the same smooth features, and skin with the sheen of burnished gold.

"I can _see_ the paths to kill it. I'm stronger, I think. But..."

"But?"

The girl spoke rapidly, the words pouring out of her. "But every time I look that far ahead, it _costs_ , I can only look so many times, and every time I look at _that one_ the futures are different, they _change_. If I start down a path and it changes under my feet, then, then..."

The woman put her hand on the girl's shoulder. It was strange, to use a human gesture of touch to reassure a being whose every feature was unnatural. Crafted in the form of humanity, yes, but far too vibrant and alive to be truly human. The girl's warm and shining golden skin, the force of the emotions that radiated from her body, even the words she used to speak. The girl wasn't speaking in English, however much it seemed to be so - her true vocabulary was that of a peasant child from Italia. Her speech was an ability of her new form, the same ability that allowed the violet one to make itself understood to humans.

"Then we can't trust your sight to give us the answer." said the woman. "We need to form a strategy on our own. A plan."

"Um. A plan. I don't think a plan will work."

"Why not?"

The girl fidgeted again, wringing her hands, pressing the fingernails of one hand against the palm of the other. An old habit, unsatisfying in her new body. The skin didn't budge.

"In my dream. This gold one, it used its power to fight and kill. It was the Warrior. The other one is different. It sees, and it sees _everything_ , it sees farther and _better_. The Thinker, the Planner. That's it's purpose, that's what it's _for_. That's all it has ever done, for thousands and thousands of centuries. And I..." She bit her lip. "I'm just a child, behind all this."

"Calm yourself, Fortuna." It took her a great deal of effort to say it with equilibrum. The girl's distress was literally radiating out of her body. "Panic will get us nowhere. All we can do is play with the cards we were dealt. Do the best we can with what we have. Does that make sense?"

The girl nodded. The waves of panic slowly lowered to a more tolerable level.

"Good. You called the violet one the Planner. What was its plan? The dream it spoke of?"

"I don't know. I only caught a glimpse. The godlings were going to bring conflict to the world. To all the worlds. Give people powers and keep them divided in endless wars. Then when they'd had their fill of blood sport they would destroy it all, kill everything on all the worlds and leave this, this _planet_ for another."

The woman considered. "Then we use your power to bring peace to the worlds. End the conflicts, or stop them before they begin."

"I...I can't be everywhere at once. They were going to give out so many powers. Hundreds of thousands of them. They already sent them, it's only a matter of time before they arrive. The gold one's powers are dead, they can't learn and grow, but they're still _dangerous_. The violet one's powers are worse, there's fewer of them but they're still alive and they're more powerful, less restricted."

"Can you stop the powers from coming?"

"I'm looking. Trying to see. I could..." the girl paused. "I could kill everyone. Kill all the people who are going to get powers. Most of them are on one world. I could blow it up."

The woman didn't respond. She let the statement hang in the air.

The girl shook her head. "...no. That would only slow them down. The powers would just pick other people, somewhere else. I would have to keep killing until everyone in all the worlds was dead. And that's assuming the violet one doesn't have a way to stop me before then."

"What is the violet one doing now? The news says it's traveling, visiting people around the world. To what end?"

"I don't know. I didn't see it doing that in my dream."

"You told me, before, that it's a deceiver. A manipulator. Is that what it's doing? Visiting people who are going to get powers, when they're still young, so that they'll worship it like a god later on?"

"I don't know. _I don't know._ I only get a glimpse if I look hard, and that costs me, I have to use up power I'll never get back, and when I look at the violet one the futures _change_ every time I look-"

"Sssh. Calm yourself, Fortuna." The woman put her arms around the girl. A disquieting sensation. As though she was embracing a child, a man, and a hundred other forms, all at the same time. Half of her brain shrieked in protest at the impossible scenario, while the other half insisted that nothing was out of the ordinary, her senses pacified by an effect of the girl's power.

The woman closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the form of the little girl she had known for a short while, before she became like this. That was a little better. She kept her eyes closed as she spoke, trying to reach the girl buried inside the alien's skin.

"I think I have the beginnings of a plan. What you've told me is that you can't do it on your own. You can't stop the powers from coming, and the violet one is going to manipulate the people with powers into conflict. Do I have that right?"

The girl nodded.

"Then you _won't_ do it on your own. You'll use your power to gain allies. Followers. People with powers, the strongest and the smartest, and politicians with influence who can enforce the peace across the worlds. You'll use your power to keep them loyal and united, so the violet one can't manipulate them."

"A secret society. Or a cult."

"No. If you try to hide yourself, if you use spies and secret agreements and back-room negotiations...I'm not an expert at any of that, but I'm thinking that's a certain way to lose. You'd be trying to beat the manipulator at its own game.

"You should operate in the open. Reveal yourself to the people of all the worlds. Tell them that the people with powers are _yours_ , your subjects, who have to bend their knee to you and follow your rules. Gather followers and use them to police the worlds, to punish the people who abuse their powers and start wars. If the violet one attacks or manipulates your followers, you can see it with your power and stop it, and you won't have to fight alone. You'll be able to call all the powered people from all of the worlds to your side."

"That's...that's..." The girl took some time to gather her thoughts. To grasp the enormity of the idea the woman had said in such simple words. She shook her head. "That's just a bigger cult. A Pope who pretends to rule all the worlds."

"I suppose." The woman stepped back and opened her eyes. She studied the girl carefully, tilting her head to see her from every angle. Then she nodded. "Yes. You said that your form was made to be worshipped. We can use that to our advantage."

The girl bit her lip. "I only wanted to save people. I don't want to be a god."

"I know, Fortuna. But in all the ways that matter, you already are." She paused, then gestured, sweeping her hand over the landscape around them. "At least, you are to _them_."

The girl turned her senses to the world around them. Her _Sanctuary_. The only world that she was certain was hidden from the violet entity's future-sight. The only world that the gold entity had guarded with unbreakable locks permitting only itself and its chosen visitors to enter.

It was a world of flesh. Amorphous, undifferentiated human flesh, piled as high as the eye could see, stretching from horizon to horizon over the entire surface of the planet. _Mountains_ of flesh, one could say, although that metaphor was a severe understatement. The deepest valleys in the sea of flesh were still far higher than the peaks of the highest mountains on Earth.

 _Her own_ flesh, now. Strange to think about.

The girl and the woman were in the center of a small clearing that she had crafted with her power, a hundred kilometers in diameter. Inside the clearing were all the necessities of life, which she had painstakingly carried by hand from other worlds. Soil and livestock and plants and water wells.

A small town was taking shape around them. Houses arranged around a grid of streets at the center of the clearing, fanning out in a gradual transition to farmlands in the periphery. The landscape was dotted with devices designed to compensate for the harsh environment of an Earth that had never known life. Devices to generate atmosphere for the residents to breathe, to regulate the fluctuations in temperature and lighting as the sun passed through the sky.

And living in the houses, working the farmlands, were her people. The three hundred and fifty six people she had rescued from lands that had been laid waste by the gold entity's impact, the people who had gained powers from the entity's blood poisoning their food and water. Many of them were _changed_ in body or mind, most of them severely so, but all of them were loyal to her cause, according to her sight. She had already ended the suffering of the many more who had been too mutated to truly live, or whose minds had been destroyed by the poison.

In a vault underground were chunks of landscapes that she had pulled from those worlds. Still tainted with the entity's spilled blood, capable of granting powers to those who ate or drank them. Most of the powers were damaged, unstable. With careful rationing and judicious choice of subjects, the vault would produce perhaps one thousand powers of varying quality.

She called them _her people_. That...wasn't entirely true. She _wished_ that could be true. That she could love and care for them, and that they would love and care for her in return. That they could live together in peace for the rest of their days. Safe in the Sanctuary she had designed in the image of the village of her birth, the village where she had lived for all her life until three weeks ago.

She wanted so badly to have it all back. _Friends. Family. Community._

But she didn't have that luxury anymore. There were billions of people on every one of the uncountable Earths, and they were all counting on her to save them. The woman who had become her best advisor hadn't let her forget it. Hadn't let her retreat into her Sanctuary with her chosen companions and abandon the rest to the whims of the evil godling.

So she did the right thing. And she hated it. It wasn't fair. If she was working to save everyone, that meant _everyone_ should be her friends, her family, her community. But the world didn't work like that.

All she had now were.... _Followers. Resources. Weapons._

The girl considered the woman's proposal.

The _followers_ and _resources_ she had weren't enough to win. They were a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of powers that would rain down on the Earths in the coming decades. But...

They were enough to gain a foothold. To conquer the most important worlds now, using powers to overcome conventional armies. To start organizations to enforce the peace, to seek out people with powers and induct them into the fold, or to neutralize them if they rebelled against the established order. To keep humanity safe and stable under its own power, leaving her free to fight off the violet entity if it interfered.

There was no guarantee. But it would give them a chance.

"...I'll do it." said the girl. "Um. If everyone else agrees. Can we call a meeting in the town hall, see what the others think? Guarino and Tesga might have some ideas.."

"Good idea." said the woman. She put a hand on the girl's shoulder. "You're very brave, Fortuna. You should be proud."

The girl fidgeted, hugged her arms to her chest. "I don't feel like a god. Everything should come easily to a god, but we don't know what the violet one can do. We can't be certain of victory."

"I know, Fortuna." said the woman. "I know. We'll have to be satisfied with hope."

**Author's Note:**

> An AU where Eden survives instead of Zion. Instead of getting the Path to Victory shard, Fortuna hijacks Zion's avatar. Eden may or may not have PTV. Cameo by Survivalist!Earth Bet!Alice Sheldon, and some kid named Jacob.


End file.
